Designing a Solarwinds Monitoring System

Designing a Solarwinds Monitoring System

I was asked to write a document of 2000 words to provide a proposal to an organisation in need of a new monitoring system.

Here is my solution, let me know what you think in the comments below the article :

Proposed Approach

The new Solarwinds monitoring system will replace all other monitoring systems and give the Service team full visibility and control of all required environments.

Configuration and training for all aspects of the modular Solarwinds monitoring environment will be provided.

Examination of the current monitoring platforms.

Examination of hardware, operating systems, SQL software and Solarwinds software, allowing us to identify whether an in place upgrade or a new server build will be required.

Discuss and agree customer priorities, defining objectives for monitoring. Questions listed in the requirement specification should form the basis of defining the objectives allowing us to create a hardware/software specification to achieve those objectives.

Infrastructure size / how many elements? Additional pollers will be required if over 12000 elements.

What is currently being monitored? (Applications, databases, servers, network devices, traffic, connectivity/supernets/subnets, transactions, logs, ip addresses, client devices and users.) This will define the type of pollers required.

To scale this environment, add additional polling engines and respective HA pollers. Additional polling engines will be installed at each remote office if required.

SQL databases, pollers and additional function servers should be backed up as part of an organizational backup service.

Solarwinds Development Environment

A virtualised single Solarwinds testing environment running with appropriate licensing for functional testing of Solarwinds monitoring procedures. No additional pollers or HA are required as this is a development environment and can be restored from snapshot at any time. Hardware and Software specifications based upon Solarwinds best practices for modular deployments.

Install and Upgrade Technical Solution

Hardware and Software including respective licensing will be specified based upon monitoring requirements, agreed and ordered. Access to Solarwinds customer portal is required to download latest software versions for each module.

If using a new Solarwinds database (not importing the old one) then before old Solarwinds database is disconnected examine the Orion database for network auto discoveries, custom pollers, bespoke alerts and custom dashboards that may be lost during the upgrade process.

Provide modular training for each implemented Solarwinds product. Demonstrate Engineers toolset that enables fault finding within Solarwinds. Demonstrate scenarios and possible ways that Solarwinds can help increase efficiency and proactively prevent failure of a production environment.

Responsibilities and Team Structure

Adam will work with Solarwinds and the service team directly to plan, design and implement a fully HA resilient, future proof monitoring system.

Adam will evaluate current monitoring solutions meeting with service and ITOC design team to discuss requirements.

The design and plan for the environment will be based on Solarwinds best practice specifications.

Adam will provide training and a suitably knowledgeable Solarwinds engineer will assist in the development of the monitoring environment and ongoing customer requirements. Adam has many standard operating procedure documents for common tasks that can be provided to staff to help with understanding of Solarwinds processes.

Adam will put together a disaster recovery document, with documentation about how to recover the Solarwinds environment from backups.

Estimated Timeframe (3 Months)

Each step of the project is given a timeframe within the three month period.

Value for Money

Key factors keeping costs down when designing a monitoring environment:

Solarwinds licensing audit. Examine number of licenses required for each product and license respectively. Evaluate number of elements required for each product and license. As an MVP Adam has access to discounts for Solarwinds products.

Hardware costs. Confirm that servers are suitably specified to provide future proofing and a high quality service to users.

Microsoft Windows Server licensing cost.

Adam will be onsite, providing assistance to the service team and carrying out the work. Adam has MVP support with Solarwinds and has access to key support teams at Solarwinds to resolve any technical problems much faster than using ordinary support procedures.

Phasing out existing disparate non-Solarwinds monitoring systems will reduce licensing and hardware costs and decrease the time taken to fix issues.

Risks and Dependencies

Risks

Downtime of monitoring systems during install of operating systems / SQL database software if in place upgrades. (1 day)

If new hardware and software are purchased the above risk is eliminated.

Solarwinds software downtime during upgrade. (3 hours)

Phasing out old monitoring systems. Solarwinds can be setup to monitor before old systems are phased out. No Risk. (Time to be agreed)

Communication of changes and work being carried out must be communicated to all departments who may be affected by new monitoring systems, especially when phasing out old monitoring systems.

Training and access will be provided when replacement of old monitoring systems goes ahead. The first phase of the project will enable evaluation of old monitoring software and give us an awareness of who may be affected and if there are any further risks.

Dependencies

Solarwinds pollers require access to all network devices and all servers via SNMP or WMI ports.

Solarwinds SQL server must have access via SQL port to main Solarwinds poller.

Hardware and software must be ordered in a timely fashion so that project is not delayed.

There is so much more we could add to a document like this, remember I was given a word limit of 2000 words.

So if you know of a company that is struggling with their monitoring infrastructure, maybe Acmtix combined with Solarwinds can help.

I am working on a IAAS project and I need a small scale monitoring environment to assure our development. If you could DM me please, I would like to talk to one of your engineers about a suitable monitoring product.